If the FAA changes its electronics rules, you can thank a reporter

Last week, a Federal Aviation Administration panel recommended that the longstanding rule requiring passengers to power down personal electronics for takeoff and landing be ditched. There’s insufficient evidence, the panel decided, that the use of Kindles, tablets, smartphones, MP3 players and laptops could interfere with a commercial aircraft’s avionics and cause problems.

The recommendation is just that: the FAA has to decide whether to adopt it. But if the agency doesn’t, U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., says she’s ready to introduce legislation requiring the FAA to drop its restrictions. So there’s a good chance you will soon be able to fly without interrupting that novel you’re enjoying on your Kindle or the game of Candy Crush Saga on your iPhone.

In part, you can thank Nick Bilton for this. He’s the New York Times reporter who, in 2011, began beating the drum for the change. In a column titled, “Fliers Must Turn Off Devices, but It’s Not Clear Why“, Bilton explored the tenuous rationale for the rule by looking at the growing body of evidence that modern personal electronics don’t impact modern jet avionics. This column, along with subsequent follow-ups, got the conversation going, and ultimately led to the FAA convening its study panel.

It was 2011, and I was engrossed in an e-book on my Kindle and kept reading as I boarded a plane heading back to San Francisco. My head down, I bumped into the plane door, then into a passenger. I finally buckled in, continuing to read. Then, just a few pages from the end of the book, I heard it. “Please power down your electronic devices for takeoff.”

Millions of people have heard this command, but I couldn’t help wondering how a $70 Kindle, which has the electronic innards of a glorified calculator, could make a $100 million plane fall from the sky?

The most interesting part of Bilton’s column comes when he asks one of the committee’s members about why the rule was enacted in the first place:

Paul Misener, vice president for global public policy at Amazon and chairman of the technical subcommittee of the F.A.A. working group, said we could actually thank old television sets for this history of gadget regulation on planes.

“There were a couple of cases decades ago where there were interferences noticed to some avionics, typically very old avionics, from devices like FM radios, or TV receivers with vacuum tubes,” Mr. Misener said. “There were instances where a plane would fly through a radar beam or a TV signal and see interference, and as a result, both the F.A.A. and the international community adopted rules that planes had to be resilient to those interferences.”

As a result, he said, they also unwittingly protected planes from future electronics.

What Bilton doesn’t mention is that there remain doubts about whether personal electronics can affect modern commercial jet aircraft. The Associated Press reported last week that Delta Airlines had told the committee that it has received 27 reports from both pilots and maintenance crews of incidents that may have been caused by interference from personal electronics. However, none of the reports could be verified.

But the reality is that the public is already ignoring the rule in droves. The next time you fly, watch what your fellow travelers do when the announcement comes that it’s time to power down and stow the electronics – many folks simply turn off the screens or put them to sleep rather than shutting them off. On a flight I took late last month to New Mexico, the majority of the people within my line of sight were clearly not turning off their devices.

Now that the FAA panel has reached its conclusions, what do you think? Will you welcome being able to use your electronics from gate to gate? Or do you think it’s a bad idea?

Let us know in the comments.

Dwight Silverman | Techblogger, social media manager

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